In context:
It becomes more and more difficult to be ‘originally’ mad; to avoid having a recognizable condition (and when we use the word ‘mad’ we don’t mean idiosyncratic). It is both comforting and confining — and can, indeed, be life-saving – when people in the know claim to know what we are suffering from. But mad people, as all these plays dramatize, make people jump to conclusions about them (anxiety makes people jump to conclusions); madness tempts people to be more knowing than they are. It certainly makes people work because they have something about someone that has to be dealt with (the mad are trying to make themselves impossible to ignore and impossible not to want to ignore).
